Man gets 15 years for raping girl, 17, on rail tracks

A Buffalo man was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in prison for robbing a 17-year-old of $1.75 while she was waiting for a bus on Halloween night in 2011, then raping her on nearby railroad tracks.

“I’m innocent,” Curlie Green, 27, of Bissell Avenue, said at his sentencing on his conviction.

“Well, the court doesn’t see it that way,” State Supreme Court Justice John L. Michalski replied.

The 15-year term also covers Green’s convictions for robbing three other women in 2011.

Assistant District Attorney Peter J. Marche urged the judge to impose the maximum prison term of 25 years.

“She thought she was going to die,” Marche said of the rape victim, adding that Green threatened “to blow her brains out.”

Neither the teen nor the robbery victims feel safe because of how Green victimized them, Marche said. “They feel like prisoners in their own neighborhoods,” he said. “He deserves the maximum ... 25 years.”

In three of the four crimes, Green used a lighter that resembled a handgun.

In September, he admitted to robbing the four females within a two-week period in October 2011 in the vicinity of Genesee and Doat streets. In all, he pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree rape, three counts of second-degree robbery and one count of third-degree robbery.

Green sought to withdraw his guilty pleas before his sentencing. But Michalski denied his request, ruling that nothing that happened during his plea indicated it was anything but knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily made.

Defense lawyer Michael J. Ingham said Green entered the pleas “under extreme pressure” during a time when he was represented by a different lawyer and did not feel he had another choice.

Ingham asked the judge to take into account Green’s criminal history of mainly petty crimes. He called the rape “out of character in my client’s history.”

Green was sentenced as a second felony offender because of a 2010 grand larceny conviction.

During the 2011 crimes, Green took a 42-year-old woman’s cellphone at about 5:15 p.m. Oct. 26 at Moselle Street and Genesee.

Just after 7 p.m. Oct. 30, 2011, near Pullman Place and Shepard Street, he took a 28-year-old woman’s money and phone, then fled north on Schutrum Street toward the railroad tracks.

On Halloween night, he approached a 17-year-old girl waiting for a bus at Genesee and Moselle. He demanded money, and the girl handed over $1.75 and her cellphone. He then forced her to go to Concordia Cemetery and onto railroad tracks, where he raped her.

The teen flagged down a car and got a ride to her aunt’s house, where she called 911.

The break in the case came three days later, when Ferry-Fillmore District Police Capt. Albert Liberatore saw a man matching the description of the rapist near Doat and May Street, close to a path leading to the site of the rape.